Friday, October 02, 2009

What a Ride!, my fifth CD of music for kids/families, was released back in June (man, I'm so behind on this blog...). The album includes 11 tracks and some guest appearances and performances by several awesome kids' music artists, many of whom I've featured here; Gwendolyn Sanford of Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, Tito Uquillas of The Hipwaders, Eric Ode, Robbi K, Chris Wiser of Sugar Free Allstars, Jim Dague of Scribblemonster, David Tobocman, Devon Thagard of Super Simple Songs, Glenn Colton and Mr. Billy.

My wife, Roseann, and I produced this album together over the past two years, and though there is certainly no objectivity here, we think it's my best album yet and we're really happy with how it turned out. Well, the final master for the first run was a little different than for subsequent runs, since I noticed some things I wanted to adjust, sound-wise... We were pressed for time to get it to the manufacturer to have copies in hand by the release date and I believe I would have chosen a different mix/master to send in for that if I'd had more time to review everything. But that's all fixed for future runs. The album as it was sounded good, just the perfectionist in me wanted a few tonal changes here and there... Regardless, I've always been very happy with the music that's on the album.

I would say that What a Ride! is less comedy oriented than albums like Snow Day! or Monkey Business, and it probably skews a little older in general than my previous albums, but it has a really nice variety to it, and thematically it loosely depicts the journey and growth of childhood and the exploration and illumination involved with that.The album also includes some of my very favorite songs from among my catalogue, specifically "Stink Bug", "What a Ride" and "How Big". "How Big", in particular, came out better than I could have hoped, especially with the soaring outro vocals by Robbi K and the chorus of friends and family on the outro refrain... I don't know if any song could really begin to describe or depict the unimaginable immensity of life and the universe, but "How Big" does give me a little bit of the feeling of that, which is what I was aiming for. We're currently working on a video for that, which will be fun to put together.

You can listen to samples of all 11 songs at this page. There are also full songs to hear, including "Heartbeat (The Stethoscope Song)", "What a Ride" and "How Big", at my Facebook page. The video for "Ants in Your Pants #99" is below, as well as the compilation video from a video dance contest we held on YouTube back in July. What a Ride! is available through my website, as well as at CDBaby, Amazon.com, iTunes and other major digital sites.